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Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

124 points by ibobev

by cyber_kinetist

0 subcomment

The one and only Holy Bible of Graphics Programming. If you're starting to learn computer graphics, just study through the entire site and do the examples one by one. It doesn't matter one bit that it uses a slightly outdated API called OpenGL - you're supposed to learn how to render things first, not about some weird obscure hardware / driver details!
After you've learned it, you can start learning CUDA if you want to do some more low-level compute stuff on the GPU (sorry, but you should just buy an NVIDIA card, CUDA is just that good). Or if you actually want to just make things but want to use a nicer cross-platform graphics API than OpenGL, then I recommend SDL3. (Or use Metal if you want to make macOS exclusive apps - it's actually a quite nice API)
Vulkan or DX12 are currently flawed APIs that are unnecessarily complex and doesn't even match the performance characteristics of current-gen hardware anymore. (see the titular post: https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api). However if you want a computer graphics career (either in the game industry or in other niche domains) having experience with these APIs will be beneficial since these are what many production apps are currently stuck with - though honestly the job market for graphics really suck nowadays. (The biggest sector was triple-A game companies with their own engines, but the game industry is imploding right now...)

by brasswood

0 subcomment

Cem Yuksel's lecture videos for Interactive Computer Graphics at the University of Utah are another free and fantastic resource. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLplnkTzzqsZS3R5DjmCQs...

by AyanamiKaine

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If you want to use the learned knowledge I would recommend to use something like Sokol [0] or use the SDL-GPU API [1]. While Sokol is more higher level both can be used. Otherwise learn opengl is a really good introduction.
[0] https://github.com/floooh/sokol [1] https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/CategoryGPU

by BraveOPotato

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Shaders used to not make any sense to me. The tutorial writes a simple expression and boom the screen is displaying all kinds of funky things.
Then I realized you're just writing code that executes on all pixels sequentially. That made it easier to understand

by the__alchemist

12 subcomments

In 2026: Please don't learn this; it's obsolete. Learn Vulkan (Or another modern API; or how to build engines on top of them; or how to write shaders; or how to do GPU compute using CUDA etc)

by leecommamichael

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At this point GL is an interface, implementations will come and go, but the interface refuses to die. It's still the simplest way to get started, and the browser (WebGL) demands portability for code written against the API.

by Bad_CRC

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I remember learning OpenGL back in the day with the NeHe tutorials, coding for the Dreamcast :)

by MoltenMan

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Man, this takes me back! I made a Minecraft clone called Mindacraft in Java using LWJGL (the same framework Minecraft uses) about 6 or 7 years ago using this tutorial. I vividly remember this tutorial being the most useful resource for OpenGL by an order of magnitude, and that was with it being written in a language that actually had pointers and buffers! (Using OpenGL in Java is very weird because you have to use pointers and buffers through a bunch of wrapper classes, and it makes things a lot weirder. It's like using unsafe in Rust if unsafe wasn't even in Rust).

by SomeHacker44

2 subcomments

by AspisAiantos

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I've gotten through the Getting Started section and found it to be quite good overall. A few times it seems to make some jumps back and forth between slightly different setups, which might lead to some problems debugging.
I definitely recommend it to anyone interested! Honestly one of the biggest things it helps with is explaining the setup boilerplate for OpenGL.

by coffeeaddict1

0 subcomment

Honestly, in 2026 I would not really bother with OpenGL. Just start with WebGPU, it's much nicer. You can use it easily on most modern browsers or better can even use native libraries like Dawn or WGPU.

by brcmthrowaway

1 subcomments

The old primitive API was the best. Who invented the new shader API? They ruined my life.